Styropyro has established a name for himself by pushing seemingly ordinary technology to its limits, and in this experiment, he demonstrates some of the fundamental physics at work in its most obvious form. He simply takes car ignition coils, the typical transformers that ignite a spark in your engine, and directs their output to a large blank circuit board.
Those car ignition coils can take a low battery voltage and provide a nice huge kick of tens of thousands of volts, exactly enough to bridge the gap that ignites your fuel in an engine. Styropyro has modified his coils to produce even more voltage than they normally would, and he has connected the high-voltage connections to a perfboard, which is a board with many holes and copper pads in a grid.
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The problem is that electricity prefers the shortest path to ground. If you’re out in the open, just take the shortest straight line and you’ll get a nice clean spark, but with a board like this in the mix, things change. The small copper rings and holes in a grid alter the game completely. Because each ring provides a lower-resistance path for the electricity to follow along the grid lines, which is much easier than jumping across empty space in a straight line. So the arc of electricity begins to spread out, making right-angle turns and following the grid lines as it travels.
Threads of blazing light snaking across the surface form complicated, maze-like patterns. The reason these strange patterns appear is that the electricity is compelled to follow the longer path, which allows it to reach ground with the least amount of air to leap. It lingers like that for quite some time, hypnotizing you with its flashing, branching arcs against the static board.
Styropyro keeps things simple, with no special components on the board and no sophisticated drivers other than what pushes the coils themselves. It’s just a fast clip that highlights the moment when everything comes together rather than fussing with it for hours. The light from the arcs acts like a half-dozen tiny spotlights, illuminating every twist and turn of the paths they traverse, throwing crisp shadows and bringing the entire scene to life.
